Masculine violence: call of duty, or call for change?

The much-hyped launch of a
new gun-shooting video game this month reveals the thread of
gender linking socially-endorsed militarism to criminal sexual assault. Where are the social programmes that would address the reshaping of masculinity?

Reclaim the Night marchThis
week many women stepped out to mark 25 November, the date designated by the
United Nations as International
Day of Action Against Violence Against Women, now the start of Sixteen Days of Activism
worldwide on this theme. A couple of weeks before, on 9 November, a very
different population had been on the streets. It was marking Remembrance
Day and, mainly men in military uniforms, they marched in memory of the
30 million fighters in all countries, also mainly men, who fell in the First
and Second World Wars.

As
I was reading the morning papers and scanning the Web on the morning of
Remembrance Day, 11 November, musing uncomfortably on remembrance and war, I
came across enthusiastic mentions of a newly-issued video game: Advanced Warfare.
It's the latest in the series Call of
Duty, the product of Sledgehammer
Games, a subsidiary of Activision. An earlier game in the CoD series, Black Ops 2,
had broken all records by grossing half a billion dollars in sales in the first
24 hours, twice that much in the first 15 days. Advanced Warfare, they predicted, was set to outsell it.

Sledgehammer's
recent products are what are called 'first-person shooters'. The gamer chooses,
holds and fires a weapon. 'You' aim and fire it. You score by 'wounding' and 'killing'
your opponents. On the website
PCGamer the reviewer admired the addition of new weapons in this update
of the game. 'Guns are littered everywhere and they're fun to shoot: big,
powerful, varied, some punching single shots through armour, others spraying
corridors with death. ..the animations and sounds and dramatic death animations
are addictive feedback. There's even a beam weapon…and heaving its energy
stream between targets, watching them drop and die, is disgustingly
satisfying.' With the new Exo-suit that
gives the wearer superhuman powers, he went on, 'I'm a walking, running,
jet-jumping massacre.'

If
no-one in your near acquaintance can give you an introductory massacre on their
state-of-the-art XBox console, look instead at a Youtube clip of Advanced Warfare that enables you to try
out your talent for slaughter. Prepare to be deafened and blinded by impacting
bullets, exploding flesh, equipment and buildings. But also, as David
Crookes insists in his review of Advanced
Warfare, be ready to 'feel at ease'. Your
controller 'vibrating violently', you cannot fail to admire the script writers'
'crisp dialogue', he's sure.

My
reason for dwelling on the game in the context of the Sixteen Days of Action
against Violence against Women is not to suggest that Advanced Warfare is a woman-killing pastime. In a rival game, Grand
Theft Auto, it had indeed been possible, for instance, to choose to
have sex with a prostitute and then shoot her instead of paying. No.
Sledgehammer Games warn against 'toxic' and 'misogynistic' play. Indeed in Advanced Warfare you have the option of
adopting the persona of a female shooter (interesting to speculate who, and how
many, make this choice).

The
game is, for all that, profoundly gendered and everything about it, including
its marketing, is unmistakeably designed to appeal to men and boys. And the
phenomena of endemic male violence against women, on the one hand, and the
militarization of the dominant form of masculinity in our culture, on the
other, while they are not the same thing, are not unrelated. Gender runs
through the continuum of
violence in contemporary society, linking, explaining and sustaining
its different manifestations. It is not accident that 90% of those serving
in the UK armed forces, trained for socially-endorsed violence, are
men; while 95% of those committing
violent crime are men, and 99% of those committing violent sexual crime
are men. (As a footnote here, I must add that the scarcity
of tables specifying sex of offender in the government's statistical
reports on crime is difficult to credit, let alone explain.)

Specifically,
the gender relation as we live it involves an association of men and
masculinity with physical strength and a readiness to use force, with rivalry
and confrontation, with attack and defence, with weaponry and warfare. It's a
relation in which masculinity and femininity are markedly differentiated,
contrasted and ranked, inviting misogyny and naturalizing men's control of
women, ultimately expressed in rape, battering and other forms of gendered and
sexual abuse. The uniformed, Exo-suited and rocket-toting man that CoD: Advanced Warfare enacts, promotes
and sells is brother to the controlling, sexually-privileged man who is
favoured in our contemporary everyday cultures.

However
- though force-full masculinity is prevalent and celebrated, there is a
counter-current of opinion today that seeks something different, that aspires
to a culture of equality, co-operation and peace. We have seen it this month in
the wearing of poppies, some of them pacifist white. We have heard it in the
chants of women parading through central London to 'Reclaim the Night'. We
recognize it in the small but persistent White Ribbon Campaign of
men working with men against violence against women.The UN gives
expression to this counter-current when it warns us that, worldwide, if we do
not act to prevent it, at least one in three women will be beaten, coerced into
sex or otherwise abused by an intimate partner in the course of her lifetime.
So do the world's peace movements, when they call for an end to the ongoing
armed conflicts that in 2013
caused a civilian and military death toll of 128,000.

But
act how? Respond how? Implicit in our concern about violence in peace and war,
and the part played in it by masculinity, is dissatisfaction with mandatory
gender types that deform and limit us as individuals. We have even developed
during the last half century a
social theory, convincing to more and more people, that the
complementary duality of masculinity and femininity, their marked
differentiation, is not destined by biology but amenable to social shaping. The
trouble is - we seldom bring this
possibility to view, and even more rarely do we give it expression as social
policy. We may have grasped the concept of socially-constituted gender, we may
have out-theorized those who shrug and say 'it's all given in the genes'. But
where, concretely, are the social programmes that openly address transformative
change in gender relations?

Where
are the purposeful measures in education, youth work, sport, vocational
training that might have shaped Kabir Ahmed, 32, British father of three from
Derby, in a masculinity different from the one that led him to fight and die
for ISIL? On the very day, 11 November, that I first read of the launch of the
new video game, The Guardian carried an
article about the death of this young jihadi in a suicide attack in
Iraq. In an ISIL podcast some months before, Kabir had described his life with
Islamic State as 'freedom, totally freedom…the good life, actually quite fun'.
He said, 'I walk round with a Kalashnikov if I want to; with an RPG [rocket
propelled grenade] if I want to.' He added, 'It's better than, what's that game
called, Call of Duty? It's like that
but, you know, 3D. You can see everything's happening in front of you. It's
real, you know what I mean?'

Dr. Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist
researcher and writer, honorary professor in Sociology at City University
London, and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of
Warwick. She lives in London. Her new book is Looking to London, published this month by Pluto Press.

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